Last Thursday, July 30th, was the World Day against Human Trafficking, a good opportunity to reflect and learn about this serious problem that affects millions of people globally and that includes Puerto Rico, to the surprise of many on the island.
Human trafficking is one of the most abominable crimes: trafficking people as if they were goods, forcing them to participate in structures similar to slavery, that we thought were buried in the past, forced labor or sexual exploitation. According to estimates by several human rights organizations, about 20 million people globally face such a terrible fate today.
That is probably an underestimated figure since such a dark activity usually takes place below the surface, although it could, as the saying goes, be a hidden in plain sight activity. According to Human Rights First, 64 percent of human trafficking victims were exploited for labor, 19 percent were sexually exploited, and 17 percent were exploited in state-imposed forced labor.
The only formal study on this problem in Puerto Rico, published in 2010 by sociologist César Rey and sponsored by the Ricky Martin Foundation, identified three modalities of human trafficking here: forced prostitution of undocumented immigrants, several schemes of sexual exploitation of minors, including those in state custody, and labor exploitation of minors, especially in the drug trafficking world.
Social and institutional life in Puerto Rico has been deteriorating over the past ten years and no action has been taken to address the problems described in that report, so it does not seem wise to expect that those problems have magically disappeared over these ten years.
Terrible situations regarding this problem have been identified in our region. For example, UNICEF, the UN children's agency, estimates that 10 percent of all children in Haití are forced to work as domestic servants. In the United States, the federal government itself recognizes that human trafficking is a significant problem within its borders, especially with women who, without permission to reside in the country, become trapped in patterns of sexual exploitation.
It is very important to understand the magnitude of this problem, to go beyond numbers. Each one of the 20 million people trapped in these schemes is a life with their rights and dreams, as human and dignified as those of any of us. They are women, children, men, and the elderly, stripped of the most basic rights, such as freedom, free will, pay for work, control over their bodies, and the right to education and a better life.
They are not just numbers, that they are lives.
Numbers do reveal that this is a monumental problem, a global tragedy impacting on the most vulnerable people who often flee their countries due to hunger, political instability or war and fall into the hands of heartless beings and transnational criminal organizations that turn their lives into hell on earth.
What can we, citizens, do to combat a problem of such a magnitude? Cathedrals are built block by block, if each citizen of the world puts up his or her own block, we will be able to fight this terrible problem. We can educate, report, and spread information that will help to identify and combat these crimes.
In short, we should do everything we can, from our particular circumstances, to eradicate this terrible social evil.
